What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Started Hollow Knight: Silksong last week, and what a game. Pretty much exactly what I was asking for, which is more Hollow Knight. Hornet would make an excellent platformer fighting game character with how fluid her movements are. I also find the story a bit easier to follow, and I'm looking forward to Mossbags lore videos about the various bosses and more minor details of the game which I have not put the time in/not smart enough to figure out.

I just finished Act 1, and I am just doing more exploring. Surprisingly, I've basically beaten every boss in 5 tries or less, except for one.

To add a bit of variety, I'm also trying to play a couple of different games on the Steam Deck when I can, such as *Citizen Sleeper and Horizon Chase

Probably not the best place to ask this, but does anyone here have experience with the MSI Claw 8+? Despite the price, it seems like a fantastic device and was just wondering if anyone would like to give some details on their ownership experience.

Ball x Pit has consumed a lot of my free time this past week since its release. The simplest comparison possible is Breakout style gameplay with Vampire Survivors laid on top of it with a variety of weapons, characters, and levels. It's the kind of thing that I'll put 30 hours into in a week or two and then never touch again, and I'm okay with that.

I have finished Until Then. The one random tildist who reads these comments might remember that I played this game back in the early summer, but the catch is that you need to relive the events of the game more than once. Since the first ending hits you like a punch to the gut followed by a knee to the groin and a few kicks to the head for good measure, I decided at the time (and in retrospect it was a good decision) to take some time away from it before continuing.

Much like everything else about this game, the repetition was done quite well. There are major unavoidable plot beats, but you start seeing differences almost immediately and those differences become more and more drastic as the mysteries behind the plot are uncovered, leading you toward the beautiful but bittersweet ending that's more typical (in my experience) of eastern-produced games. In any event, this was time well spent, and I recommend the game (read my older comment for first impressions).

I have reached room 46 in Blue Prince! I'm still playing that, since it's a big game. Look like @arghdos got to where we are at a similar playtime though so we're probably keeping a reasonable pace ourselves ;)

Currently at 34 hours and the fears I expressed in the past did not materialize. Most of our runs are still productive and interesting, with meta-progress being steadily made. There is now a ridiculous amount of screenshots in our discord channel for the game, and we're also keeping an information-packed google spreadsheet for collaboration. We still have a number of clear goals we're working towards; we have yet to feel stuck. Much like the relatively recent ANIMAL WELL, this is a problem-solving game with a lot of charisma and style, packed with content, and with several layers of depth. I love that games like this, that cater to tastes like mine, are just coming out regularly now!

Previous

Chants of Sennaar (Switch) was finally on offer on Switch this month, so I've been playing that.

I really liked the demo of it, and so far I've played past the end of the section that involves the race of characters that begin the game. You talk to the characters, who speak in a sort of glyph code, and have to decipher what it means by the context. Then there are puzzles that use this knowledge to advance - an early one for example is to decipher open / closed, and use that information to open or close some valves according to a sign, to change water flow to let you past.

The second floor I'm in now has gone a bit off the rails though. It turned from the chill puzzle game to a stealth game akin to Metal Gear Solid, where the language takes a back seat and it's all about timing your sneaking between guards. One wrong move and you get "killed" and sent back to the start of the area. It's too stressful! I had read complaints about this aspect, but thought they might be overblown. I was not expecting so much stealth to be involved, figuring it'd be a room or two (like in the demo). But no, it's room after room. Makes the part in Breath of the Wild with the banana-loving guys seem short and sweet.

The sneaking controls are also rather unusual, in that the game gives you these markers you can go to, which are fixed and shown by a white outline of your character, but the position is not always clear about which side of a wall it is on. So sometimes you think you will sneak to hide behind a wall, but in fact you sneak into a location on this side of a wall, out in the open, and get caught instantly. In addition, the enemies' outfits have very small details so you can barely tell the direction they are looking in. I've occasionally thought the guard was facing away from me, ran out "behind" said guard only to discover they were looking right at me. I just want the chill puzzles back! :(

(Edit: OK, I got past the roadblock, and the puzzling returned for a while... phew!)

After continuing past that tricky stealth part, it turns out it really was just a few rooms. It just felt like a lot more at the time! The rest of the game has not really involved anything as bad. There are a couple of timed jumps past obstacles, but they have been pretty easy to do. There was one more stealth section, but it was limited to literally one room, and used a second mechanic too so had some variety.

I think I may be near the end now. At least on the save screen it seems that all the niches on the tower that were initially empty now have doors showing. There are a few things I know I missed as I have a few words still left to translate.

Overall I've enjoyed the game, stealth section apart, and looking back even that wasn't so bad I suppose.

I really like it when games take information you thought you needed to solve one puzzle, but after something else is revealed later on you realize there was a second meaning to the same information that solves another problem. Chants of Sennaar does that trick a lot in the small, by giving you language "glyphs" in different contexts so you can try to guess their meaning, and then there are at least 2 memorable (to me) moments where it happens in a slightly bigger way. Information you thought you had finished with becomes a vital clue to progress past another point.

I've been living in Pokémon Legends Z-A since it released. I won't lie, I am just so happy with the fashion. It's still fairly limited (why must it have the ugly skorts?!), but it's leagues better than the customization in Scarlet and Violet. I've already found one go-to feminine outfit, and now I'm working on my more tomboy looks.

Meanwhile, I really like the real-time battle system. It requires more attention, but it also makes the environment really matter. I've had attacks blocked by the environment, and I've avoided attacks by switching out at the right moment... A lot of moves feel so much more impactful in real-time, like Protect and Detect, or the trap moves like Spikes and Stealth Rock leaving debris on the field that can harm your Pokémon. I've even had a double knock-out where both our attacks landed at the same time! That's freaking awesome!

I've never been into the competitive side of Pokémon, but this system is still getting gears turning in my head as I think up strategies. Moves I've never given much mind to in favor of damage-heavy moves now feel a lot more viable when I don't have to waste an entire turn and can go right into the next move. I want to try to get a Greninjite from the Ranked Battles, and this system makes the prospect feel fun.

I've been playing Dredge on the Steam Deck, in my bed before sleep.

I actually bought it at release, but I was pretty disappointed. I was expecting a Lovecraftian game in a fishing setting, but it's actually a fishing game with a Lovecraftian-ish mood. It's not a bad, but just not what I wanted to play at the time.

Anyway, I gave it another go a few weeks ago, and I've been enjoying it so far. It's fairly chill: there is a main quest and side quests, many upgrades to unlock for your ship, a ton of different species to fish, and mysteries to unravel (or not). You can almost do anything you want, nothing is pressing you. Except selling fish that is still fresh, and some quests that reward you with upgrade materials and unlock a few areas.

The only minor complaint I have is that so far (and from what I've played), sailing at night during the game's first half is a "high risk, low reward" activity. It's fun by itself, and it's required to collect a few species, but damaging your ship can quickly become costly. And when you finally unlock some pretty powerful upgrades, it makes things much more trivial, and thus less thrilling. But again, it's mainly a relaxing fishing game, so that's not an issue.

I played just a few hours of the Arc Raiders Server Slam this weekend and even with all the limitations this build of the game had, I'm pretty optimistic for the full release in 10 days. The game looks great and runs smoothly (on my machine at least, seems like some folks with AMD GPUs were experiencing slightly more performance issues), the sound effects are fantastic and atmospheric, the PVE robots are everything from mildly dangerous and annoying to absolutely terrifying, the third person perspective works well even in PVP and indoors, the looting and UI in general is considerably less clunky than other extraction shooters, especially Tarkov's, and while you still do lose all your loot if you're knocked out (except for what's in your safe pocket), it's quick and easy to either craft some essentials back or just grab a free loadout and immediately jump into a fresh match.

This game takes some big steps towards being the most accessible extraction shooter on the market, namely:

• No progress wipes except for an optional prestige
• A chicken at your safehouse that retrieves crafting materials over time, and can be upgraded to retrieve more
• A skill tree for meta-progression, so you don't start from zero if you get knocked out
• A free loadout option with no catch or cooldown, so you can always play with nothing to lose
• A generous crafting system that allows you to get some decent gear made just from gathering common materials in the (relatively) low-risk zones
• A skill that lets you craft some items even in the field, which can come in extremely clutch if you run out of bandages or shield rechargers
• The ability to activate the exit elevator even while you're downed and crawling around
• An abundance of loot, which makes it easier to rat for a decent profit, and gives players less incentive to kill other players on sight if they're already full up
• Genuinely threatening PVE enemies with good loot which encourage players to play smarter and stealthier, or team up
• Proximity chat and in-game emotes that can be heard nearby, in case you want to signal to other groups that you're not hostile (or shit talk them, but it is a competitive game after all so that's kind of expected)

I'm holding off on pre-ordering the game out of principle, but if I can get some friends interested I'll definitely pick it up with them. The game is definitely playable solo or queued with randoms, I was only queuing with randoms during this server slam, but it really shines when you're actually communicating, sharing loot, and working together.

Honorary mention to Egg Inc., which is a mobile idle game I've been "playing" for years, as much as you can consider mobile idle gameplay to be playing. I've been pretty comfortably at endgame for a while now but they dropped a major update a bit over a month ago that added a new game mode tailored for endgame players, and it's actually got me actively playing it again rather than just doing my idle routine. If you want a mobile idle game to play, I can recommend this one.

I picked up No Case Should Remain Unsolved on Steam since it was on sale and I was itching for a mystery game.

It's almost entirely a text-based game. But it's presented in a unique way. The player takes on the role of an old woman, an old police detective who's questioning her choices and role in a case of an unsolved child kidnapping decades ago when she was still on the force. However, this former detective has started losing her mental faculties, dementia or something, and her recollection of the case is all over the place. She misremembers who said what during questionings, she can't remember names, the order of events, etc. And she's kinda despondent over the fact that she couldn't solve the case. Yet she's agonizing over the fact that she didn't do enough.

As the player, it's our job to help reorganize her thoughts, making connections between the dialogs or reports, to get to the bottom of the case. As we successfully connect and reorder everything, that further unlocks other memories and dialog from various characters and suspects in this kidnapping, until we have a full understanding of the case and what actually happened decades ago to the kidnapped child.

There's a bit of a twist at the end, which I won't spoil, but it is a satisfying ending. It'a a short game; only took me 4hrs. I wish it were a little longer, but I was still satisfied all the same.

Have been playing Kenshi for the past couple of days, got it on sale. I'm a big Rimworld fan and I heard that this is a similar sort of vibe where you're dropped in a hostile world and can sorta just do whatever.

Things I like:

• The core gameplay is really solid. It's just a really fun sandbox with a lot of cool stuff in it. There's a lot of depth here, at least compared to other sandboxes, which as a genre tend to suffer from chronic inch-deepness. I lost interest in No Man's Sky because there just wasn't enough to keep me engaged once I realised it was a 15-minute gameplay loop with a bunch of shiny things tacked on.

• It gives you a ton of freedom as a player without feeling overwhelming. I don't think I've explored even a quarter of the game's systems yet, but I still feel like I'm accomplishing a lot and am in a comfortable place in the gameplay loop. Compare it to something like Dwarf Fortress which, while giving the player an absurd amount of freedom in every way, shape, and form, also requires that the player picks up on half of these systems fast if they want to survive for any length of time. You can go blind into Kenshi. You'll probably have an aneurysm trying to pick up DF with no wiki.

Things I don't like:

• It's a buggy unfinished mess. Moreover it's the type of buggy unfinished mess that the community has decided you're not allowed to complain about because they're fine with it being a buggy unfinished mess. There are typos and grammatical errors in half of the dialogue, it suffers from horrific popin and graphical glitches atop of what is already a bad-looking game, pathfinding, NPCs, most systems are broken in some regard.

• It controls like an experimental 3D MMO from 2003, and not in a good way. I don't know what the correct way to handle Kenshi's kind of movement system is, but it ain't whatever it's doing. It's not the worst thing in the world by any means, certainly it's usable, but I just keep thinking that this game was made in 2018.

I'm having a lot of fun with it all the same though. My favourite games are Skyrim and Dwarf Fortress so, idk, I have a type I guess. Hopefully Kenshi 2 will be all the good parts of the first game without the bad parts that pull it down.

I have been playing Battlefield 6 non-stop. This game is just so much fun and it's the first time in a while where I've sunk this much time into an online PVP game. It does such a great job of not being overloaded with modern gaming bullshit like all of the dumb skins in CoD games these days. It was a one time purchase, the game works flawlessly, it's fun to play, it isn't monetized (yet), and free content updates are coming as soon as next week. I'll be playing this game for a loooong time. I'm playing mostly recon, which is my long time main in Battlefield games, but I've also been playing quite a bit of assault. Assault rifles are just ridiculously good on that class and I'm currently working to unlock spawn beacons.

Gnosia.

I heard about the really interesting anime and that it was based on a visual novel so rather than watch the anime I picked up the game. I’m glad that I picked it up because it’s so different than the games I normally play that I wouldn’t have played it otherwise.

First off, it’s not a visual novel. It has presentation like one but it really isn’t based around a narrative. Or at least if it is, it hasn’t really come up yet. Instead it’s more like a single-player version of Werewolf where your abilities to persuade people are based on RPG style stats that you can level up. Additionally all of the characters have personalities that decide how they act.

The gameplay is astonishingly polished. The game Slowly introduces the rules, which helps it to seem simple even though there strategies and things to understand are very complex. There is a help section designed to be used as reference that covers everything but I would never have been able to enjoy the game if I was just given that. There also seems to be some behind the scenes help from time to time. I’ve had times when I was sure that someone was the Gnosia and I pressed hard to convince everyone but they all voted for someone else - who of course had to be an actual Gnosia.

And it’s surprisingly thrilling! Every action you take - including inaction - has a social cost, and if you expend too much you will be voted to cold sleep and lose. And if you figure out who is Gnosia but fail to convince everyone, the Gnosia may kill you. I find things get really enjoyable once you can choose which role to take because that can change your strategies and keep the game fresh. I really enjoy playing the Engineer because I like being more active in figuring out who is Gnosia. I also enjoy playing as Gnosia but I haven’t managed to win once with that role.

So a few weeks ago I posted about how I decided not to play Once Human once I found out you cannot rebind the interact action. I have since revisited that proclamation and wrote an AutoHotkey script that rebinds E to F and F to E while playing the game. AutoHotkey scripts are risky in online games since anticheats like to false-positive flag them as botting software, but so far it's been fine.

If there's one thing I really don't like about the game so far though is that the game provides absolutely zero on-hit feedback (i.e. some kind of screen effect or animation that you're taking damage). I've had several deaths so far, and every single one of them without exception was because I just do not notice I'm taking damage at all. Sometimes because enemies are attacking me I'm not even aware of, but most of the time it's just being hit by bullets (which also doesn't have any kind of visual effect) or being affected by damage-over-time effects (which I think may have a tiny icon on the UI, but you're equally as unlikely to notice that icon as your healthbar going down). Anytime I'm in combat I basically just have to stare constantly at my healthbar, which is very annoying.

Other than that the gunplay and general exploration is pretty enjoyable. Unfortunately, most of the EU servers (as far as I'm aware) are completely dominated by Russians who exclusively use cyrillic, so there's absolutely no social aspect at the moment. For this reason, common advice for EU players seems to be to actually play on NA servers, but I'd be worried about the ping in that case.

I'm not very far into it yet, so I don't know what the endgame experience is like. If anyone has any experience with this game, I'd love to hear it.

I was looking for something appropriate to the season, so I decided to start playing Costume Quest on my Steam Deck. I've owned this game for probably over 10-years now and continually started it around this time and never made it past the first area before dropping it. But something about playing it on the Deck is just the right fit, I have no idea why I never tried before.

Anyway, I don't have any new thoughts on this old game, other than the fact that it feels absolutely great to play around this time of year and its Halloween vibes are off the charts. The combat is so-so, but goes by quick enough that it's not too bad--though I do wish you could skip some of the cutscenes in it--and you're basically doing the same thing in each area, a concession of being an early, cheap indie game, but the vibes are good and seeing what each new costume does is pretty cool. I'm hoping to finish this one this time and then maybe I'll move on to Costume Quest 2 in the future...

A few weeks ago, I searched for lists on the best modern Mario games and landed on Super Mario Bros U Deluxe first. I gotta say, this sh!t is not easy, and my completionism is off the charts trying to get all the super coins. Ghaaadayum it’s difficult! Coming from SNES to the Switch is something more than I anticipated. Generations of PlayStation has had me in its clutches for too long.

I also just got the Galaxy One/Two pack that just came back on sale, so I will finally get to play that too. I see where Team Asobi gets all of their inspiration from for Astro Bot.

I suppose after those three, I’ll have to get into 3D World and Odyssey…

So far behind on all of these!

Still playing Cobblemon this week with the kids. We added a couple of addon mods to make the experience more fun.

First is a mod that allows your Pokémon to fight vanilla Minecraft mobs. Cobblemon felt very disconnected from Minecraft before since the Pokémon never interacted with the mobs. With the new mod in place there is an incentive to have your Pokémon out of their Pokéballs following you around. It's pretty fun to go caving with your 6 Pokémon guarding you.

The second mod we added allows select Pokémon to be used as mounts. I say select, but there are actually quite a lot of rideable Pokémon. Some are only rideable in evolved forms too, so figuring out the best mount options added a cool new dimension to the game. In addition to land mounts, we also discovered that there are certain water types that can be used to swim underwater without losing breath, and a few flying types that can be used to fly around. They are even better than Elytra in a couple of key ways. For starters, they don't consume fuel of any kind, so you can fly them forever. Secondly, they can hover! Since you can still interact with the world while on a mount, we've been able to use them for building.

We also took our Pokémon to the Ender Dragon fight, and as is customary in my family we took an end selfie. Here's the pic of me and the kids about to take on the dragon.

After finishing Mafia: The Old Country (which I really liked) a couple of weeks ago, I started playing Tomb Raider (2013) on my Steam Deck, as I had to be out of town all last week for work. Given that game's age, it runs like butter on the deck. I'm probably about 4-5 hours in and enjoying it quite a lot. I haven't played any Tomb Raider game since Tomb Raider 1 and 2 on PC back at their original 1990s releases. It does feel very scripted and linear, but that's totally OK with me. My Lara has already got a Rambo-tier body count under her belt, mostly all sneaky-like with bow and arrow.

Now that I'm back home, I needed a new game to get started on my Xbox, which is how I pass the time when exercising in my basement. I settled on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015). It's been in my backlog forever and totally passed me by at release time, and I wanted something big to get stuck into and probably play every morning while I exercise for the next couple of months. I picked it up on sale ages ago and just never got around to playing it, mostly probably because of Gamepass, which I canceled for obvious reasons a few weeks ago.
I'm just a couple of hours in now and only at level 2. It is still very much in early game tutorial mode. This game looks absolutely fantastic for its age, though I am aware that it got some 'next gen' upgrades when the Xbox Series/PS5 came out. I'm just taking it slow and enjoying the world. I'm about to take on what feels like it's going to be the first boss/miniboss fight of the game, where I have to slay a griffin that's been terrorizing a village to gain favor with some occupying military assholes.

Played Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC last week. First off, the optimization sucks. I had a RTX 3070, Ryzen 7 5800X, and 32gb ram. Played on a SSD. According to Nixxes own chart, I should have been able to play at UHD, no ray tracing, 60fps. Not true at all. Struggled most of the time. Frames dropped regularly. Even after changing some config files as recommended on Reddit and turning off overlays.

Ended up upgrading to a 5070TI. Local best buy had one close to MSRP, so I snatched it up. With DLSS on, I was able to play 4K and ray tracing on. Even then there were still drops in frame rates during certain moments.

That aside, I loved this game. But I love the story of the first game more. The improvements and additions to the mechanics were awesome. Peter had good upgrades that made him fun to play when compared to Miles, who has his own abilities.

The villains felt a bit tougher and events had more variety. Particularly putting out all the fires. I actually liked the MJ mission in the first one. So I appreciate that she had more to do here. The reasoning is backed by the story from the Miles Morales game and the start of this game. It felt like a natural progression.

I'm still salty over Peter's face change. Specifically over the reasoning they gave initially. But that's whatever.

Overall I really liked this game. I'd at the first one is better, but not by much. I'm looking forward to the third and probably last game in this series.

I’ve been playing Necesse, a sandbox survival building game that is like if Terraria had a baby with Rimworld.

Create a settlement to attract NPCs, or go hunting for them in the wild or bribe them to join from their own villages. Attend to the needs of the NPCs - including furnishing a house and giving them a varied diet - and they will do assigned work using a system that isn’t as indepth as Rimworld (of course, since that isn’t the game’s focus) but still pretty impressive. For instance, I have a system of sorted chests that all my settlers do all the work of organizing, leaving me all the time in the world to do the fun cave diving and boss hunting parts. They can gather resources, process them, and even fight.

I can see it becoming a new obsession for me. You can build traps and tripwires and logical machines with gates, have multiple settlements with stations and minecarts between them. There’s multiplayer. One of my problems with Terraria was that I wasn’t a fan of the side scrolling for building, but Necesse is top down. It is really good!

Managed to finally set up BeamNG on Linux Mint with the Logitech G29 steering wheel with pedals and a shifter. It's been a real joy.

Finished Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake

Game's pretty fun, I ended up only doing a priest->sage, mage->sage and warrior->martial artist-> monster wrangler for my 3 non-hero homies' class changes, and it was completely adequate for a casual first playthrough normal mode. I hear some of the postgame superbosses require like lv99 tightly tuned parties though so I'm kinda thinking I keep my save file and come back to it for that some day in the future, but right now I'm more eager to move on to other games. I'm still feeling DQ so I'm kinda prodding at Dragon Quest V's PS2 fan translation via emulation on my Steam Deck, and Dragon Quest VIII on my 3DS and then see which one sticks.

Picked up Dispatch this morning. Absolutely loving it so far. The characters are great, the story is interesting, and the animation is beautiful. I don't feel like I've seen enough of the actual dispatching game play to say how deep it's going to get. In the first 2 chapters it's pretty simple. Send the fast guy on a fast guy mission. Send a strong guy on a strong guy mission. But there's hints that the individual team members' unique abilities will come into play more as it goes on.

Really not a fan of the episodic content though. But take that as compliment for how into the game I was when I hit the end. It's the first game I bought on release day in years, and of course it's the one that comes out week to week.

I finished the 1st ending to Silent Hill F. I really enjoyed it. I'll go back and complete the other endings after I finish Ghost of Yotei. It's been really fun so far.

I replayed Colony Ship now that it has been finished a while. There are things to like here but also design decisions that I personally disagree with. They however added difficulty options which is good and mitigates some of the problems I had with it originally.

It is a party or solo RPG with some free choice about how to navigate the encounters. Both non combat and combat playthroughs are possible which is nice.

The tone of the setting is very cynical and I would say nihilistic. It also has a can't do attitude on societal level which I personally don't find very enlightening or helpful.

Related to that is the choice of faction design. Here they are more like a bunch of flaws in a trenchcoat instead of something where you as a player pick based on both flaws and strengths of the faction(this is incidentally also why I didn't even finish Elex since I refused to join any faction there).

The story is also very linear for the developer with main differences being how you do something for who and what optional objectives you can get rather than more extensive branching.

It can also be seen that a lot of care went into the design and balancing but they chose to balance it right to the edge. Both in encounter design and in the skill check based interactions but it is a main area where the difficulty options can moderate the experience based on player preference.

Hades: Finally beat Megaera late one night, didn't know I could save mid-run, took a break and died on the second zone the next day. But progress. I watched the IGN "Developers React to a 25 minute Fresh File" speedrun that fundamentally shifted how I play, but not in cheesy ways (I'm very aggressive, and that video was a masterclass in aggressive play). It displaced Hollow Knight, which I'm still trying to work through.

Lord Ambermaze is an interesting game. They had a pretty aggressive ad campaign in like March for their demo, and I was sold on the concept. It's sort of a cozy turn-based adventure that plays like a traditional roguelike, solidly turn-based. It's a weird sort of strategy game I like where movements are like chess (like Crypt of the Necrodancer, HyperRogue or Sproggiwood).

Hollow Knight: I really wanna check out Silksong, but am determined to at least reach a HK ending first, and am maybe halfway there. I just started to scratch the surface on Deepnest, and just haven't made the time to progress, but still love the game.

Megabonk: Still grinding the AFK Gamer challenge, trying to use Megachad to start with Aura, get a Attracton Tome, and go from there. I got down to 1:15 already so that's progress. Haven't even touched the desert since I unlocked it.

Insurgency Sandstorm, but this time I forced myself to play against humans in Versus mode. Boy is it a different experience. When AI sees you from the other side of the map, it almost always ignores you or takes RNG-based shots at you, which in a long range almost never hits. Humans, however, hit you almost every time, also over long distances. Also it doesn't help that I play the game on a TV screen whereas I suspect most other people use computer monitors. Of course the fun part is that while AI always sees you even when you sneak up on them, humans might not.

So my tactics end up being rather CQB with a lot of flanking, and even that works only rarely. I tried snipers a few times, but there's simply no way I can ever succeed at that.

Road to Vostok got a final demo release, which I tried a couple of times. This is a very bleak game, like the spirit of everything that is Finland has been poured into it. Very atmospheric and the way the enemy bandits talk is genuinely unnerving, especially to a Finn.

Future:

I'm looking for something new to play, and two games are on my radar: Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon and Zero Sievert. The first is a Skyrim clone that looks very promising and fun to play, the other is a 2d pixel extraction shooter with permadeath which looks like a very difficult game and probably extremely painful to play.

edit Tried Zero Sievert today. Looks and feels really good!

I’ve been playing Vintage Story, which is a minecraft-like block game with a bigger focus on realistic survival mechanics and lore. I really likes minecraft (I played it a lot when it came out!) and this feels like a more adult version of the same, with a slower gameplay loop. The most unique feature is being able to craft custom block shapes through chiseling. The mod support is also really good and even in early access there are fantastic mods available. Overall I had a lot of fun and since this is an early access game I see myself returning to it year after year as long as it continues to get updates.